Jeff Missinne is, even though he wouldn’t have admitted it, important in the emerging fandom and subsequent revival of classic animation in the 70s, 80s and 90s.
I knew Jeff since he was 32. That was nearly 40 years ago now. I was a teenager then, collecting cartoons, and we often exchanged cartoons as well as many years of phone calls and letters. He was essential in helping me start “Snappy Video” the pre-curser to the things we do now at Thunderbean. I’ve kept all of Jeff’s letters, and rather me pontificating about Jeff, I thought I would be fun to put some of these up for you folks to get a flavor of what it was like knowing him.
In the bigger picture, I’m continually grateful for the generation of animation fans that are just a little older than I am. They kept the faith and did the research at a time where there just wasn’t much academic interest in such things. I’ve been lucky enough to meet and know quite a few of the people who I really looked up to as a teenager first discovering 16mm film collecting, and soon after it old issues of little ‘zine Mindrot / Animania.
The high school I went to was a few blocks from downtown Ann Arbor, and during lunch I’d often head into town, right after school, to my favorite used book shop. At first I was buying issues of Funnyworld, then asked the shop to do a search for a few particular books- that was the way you found a particularly rare book. I got Field’s Art of Walt Disney and two copies of The Fleischer Story that way, at a time where you just couldn’t find those.
At some point, someone sold them a big pile of Mindot’s, and I’d buy them for a dollar each or so, usually with lunch money. I still cherish those issues. Jeff wrote an column called ‘The Catbird Seat’ for many issues. Here’s one from Mindrot, issue 15, from 1979:
Click to enlarge
When I started to get to know Jeff a little better and as he started helping me navigate the particulars of figuring out how to transfer films, I was delighted to find that he would often write a personalized ‘Catbird Seat’ to me, helping with copyright searches especially since he had the much coveted ‘Film Superlist’ book that could be used to determine what films for Public Domain:
Sometimes Jeff would update me on the latest things he’d watched or what was happening in the news about new shows. Here’s an especially interesting one from 1990:
The letters would often have added drawings, like this example from early 1990:
He joked at one point about Snappy Video, my little company, releasing a set of PD Disney cartoons. Here was his joke cover. I actually used a few years ago as a reversible cover on PD mouse Adventures:
Jeff and I didn’t always see eye-to-eye, and he let me have it several times over the years. One of those times I credit as actually forcing the teenager I was at that time to put serious work into what I was pursuing. That particular ‘tough love’ was a difficult lesson, but lead to much better grounding for the company (more on that sometime soon).
We always managed to stay good friends and chat here and there. It was Jeff that first showed me many of the Van Beuren cartoons I’d never seen, including Piano Tooners, a majority of the Cubby Bears and Ted Eshbaugh’s Wizard of Oz (1933) in black and white. This led me on a lifetime pursuit to see Eshbaugh’s films in color. That is, of course, now old history.
I loved chatting with him all those years, and was very lucky to have had him as a friend.
Have a good week all,
